


The inconvenient ones

by Jessa_yeah



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Autism, Autistic!Hermione, Gen, Hermione just really loves libraries ok, Multi, Neurodiversity, Triad - Freeform, all the autistic feels, autistic harry potter characters, autistic!Luna, autistic!Millicent, autistic!Neville, autistic!Susan, librarian!hermione, the many ways of being on the autistic spectrum, writer!Hermione
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-12
Updated: 2020-01-12
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:19:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22232410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jessa_yeah/pseuds/Jessa_yeah
Summary: The world was a loud, complicated place that gave her a headache and that she had always felt a stranger in. Autistic Hermione.
Relationships: Hermione Granger/Harry Potter/Ron Weasley
Comments: 10
Kudos: 101





	The inconvenient ones

**Author's Note:**

> I was blown away by the response to 'My hand in yours', a short story featuring an autistic Hermione, so I decided to write another one. I am autistic myself and this is very much inspired by my own experiences and those of my autistic friends so, like my fics often have the tendency to do, it became rather personal and heartfelt. Hope you enjoy!

The world was a loud, complicated place that gave her a headache and that she had always felt a stranger in. 

The library offered a refuge. 

Yes, she loved reading; learning new things, the smell of books and browsing the titles and covers, but there was more to it than that. In truth, the library was the only place she felt comfortable. Here, silence settled after you. Rules were explicit and easy to understand - themes, alphabet, leave other occupants alone unless you have a specific question. 

She dreamt of visiting large famous libraries; she dreamt about having her own one day so she could put up heavy velvet curtains and roam between the shelves whenever she wanted. 

The Hogwarts library was everything she ever imagined and more. It was bigger, its books were older, covering topics she’d never even heard of, faintly buzzing with magic. It was a refuge more than ever in those difficult first months, when Hermione struggled with the sights and sounds of Hogwarts, with new time schedules, with trying to reach out to classmates and being rejected. Hermione knew she was being odd somehow but couldn’t put her finger on why exactly, or how to fix it. 

A few teachers were just as bad as her classmates. Some were kinder, but she didn’t quite know if that was just because she knew all the answers to their questions. One asked her questions she  _ couldn’t  _ answer - not about the subject they taught, but about herself. 

_ Why can’t I seem to get ahold of you? Why are you isolating yourself?  _

Madam Pince didn’t ask questions. She watched and kept order and shared knowledge. Hermione appreciated that. 

She only left the library for lessons and meals and some hours of sleep. 

Everything became a bit easier after the incident with the mountain troll. Strange how having two friends by your side made the world a safer place. She didn’t think they were like her, not like that, but they had their own reasons why they didn’t fit in. Most importantly, Ron and Harry had thought about a crying classmate and saw her as not a weird Know-It-All but as a scared girl their age, worth getting in trouble for. 

And in Hermione’s life so far, that had been very rare. So she decided  _ they  _ were worth getting in trouble for, too. 

It would still be the three of them, through lessons and quests and war, through loud rows and periods of not speaking to each other and then making it up again. It would always be the three of them even as Hermione’s social world slowly expanded, Ginny Weasley pulling her along on midnight adventures, talking with Parvati Patil and Lavender Brown about Jane Austen. Hermione relaxed her guard a little. 

Through the years, she got to know people she understood without necessary even liking them. They exchanged glances without quite looking each other in the eye, information and small gifts and frustrated words. 

I hear you. I see you. I notice you. I relate to you. You are not alone. 

They struggled to be allowed to exist as they were, to survive in a society not build for them, between people that had never been taught to understand them. Their interests were intense and odd; their way of connecting was different; the world was a different place to them. They were the weird ones, inconvenient in this society, queer in every sense of the word. Hermione herself, ruthless and tired with her struggles to prove her worth. Luna Lovegood, who had long ago stopped trying to fit in, only putting work into what interested her, unashamedly speaking her truths and octorisised because of it. Neville Longbottom, for whom nothing was easy, anxious and quiet and wanting for the kind of stability that modern life rarely offered. Millicent Bullstrode, who had young learned that people weren’t kind to big, clumsy and unintentionally rude girls like her, so she owned the world none of her own kindness - save her cat and her few friends. Susan Bones, with a single-minded determination well underway to follow her aunt’s footsteps in fixing the deep unfairness ingrained in the justice system that was so glaringly obvious to her it sometimes made her cry. 

None of it was fair, they deserved better, and yet here they all were years later, just trying to make the best of this messy thing called life. Hermione proudly thought that, despite the remaining struggles, they were doing rather well, actually. She herself was sitting between shelves and shelves of books - a few titles in the history section written by herself - and overwatched the Hogwarts library that was now under her care. On her parchment-scattered desk stood a framed picture: herself in a glorious blue dress, flanked by Ron and Harry who were both dressed in matching navy robes, all three beaming out into the world.

She recommended a novel written by an autistic writer to a solemn kid that had been here every afternoon for a couple of weeks now. 


End file.
